Spring 2015

Asian American Studies - core courses

Pan-ethnic Asian American racial identities, communities, and cultures have been shaped by the contradictory aims of U.S. state during its most legible moments of nation-building from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Prior to World War II, the semi-voluntary and forced recruitment of Filipino, Asian Indian, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants provided the cheap, expendable labor needed to build the economic and technological infrastructure of a modernizing U.S. nation-state. Following World War II, new transnational networks extended the military, political, and economic reach of the U.S. state into different regions in Asia and racial policies shifted towards managing increasingly decentralized “cultural flows,” including migrants from countries impacted by the U.S. Cold War in South/Northeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Much of late 20th century Asian American literary and cultural production (including criticism) has focused on reclaiming the erased histories and narratives of Asian Americans and Asian diasporas that have contributed to—while problematizing—America’s modernity. The turn of the 21st century has posed renewed questions around American empire, war, and transnational, regional, and local economic and political expansion—questions that situate and delimit prior approaches to Asian American literatures, cultures, histories, and social identities and movements.

This course will engage with Asian American literature and bio/digital/visual cultures and their relationship to social identities and histories and political mobilization through the lens of technology. How does a rethinking of race, racialization, and racism as technologies contribute to our understanding of racial formation, histories, and futures, especially at this moment in time? How do bio/digital/visual cultures based in performance, film/video, and the Internet as mediating technologies reframe our interactions with Asian American literature and with race, gender, sexuality, class, and migration?

Course materials will also include select film and digital media screenings.

Course requirements may include an in-class presentation, regular participation in a course blog, and final paper project. The course will fulfill requirements towards English and Asian American Studies majors and minors. (Check with your program/department for more details.)

A survey of how Asian immigrants, their American-born children, and international relations with Asia have shaped U.S. History. We will focus on three broad themes in this course: 1) how immigration and migration have shaped Asian America, from local communities to global transnational networks; 2) how Asian American experiences have shaped U.S. history; 3) how the construction of collective identities, based on ethnic, religious, and/ or pan-ethnic Asian American solidarity, connects with movements for social and political change.

Fulfills GE in Historical Study; Cultures and Ideas; and Diversity: Social Diversity in the US.

This course examines the experiences and cultural representations of Asian American women to explore intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nationality in U.S. and Asian societies. Cross-listed with History 3612.

GE Historical Study; GE Diversity: Social Diversity in the U.S.

Asian American Studies - additional courses

The following courses can count toward the 9 credit hours of Asian American Studies coursework, provided that students complete a final project on an Asian American topic.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), and other sexual and gender non-conforming people, identities, and cultures have been represented in contradictory ways in relationship to modernization and globalization. Using a comparative approach, this course will explore the new visibility of LGBT and sexual and gender non-conforming social movements, identities, and cultures in cities, nations, and regions that have become networked economically, politically, and culturally, especially since the mid-20th century. Moving between political, historical, and cultural literature, film, and digital media in translation, the course will focus on LGBT and sexual and gender non-conforming visibilities in the U.S., Thailand, South Africa, Chile, and Taiwan and the changing regions of which they are a part. The course will look to situated local, diasporic, and regional queer and trans critical approaches for potential interventions and subversions in dominant networks of visibility.

Course materials will also include select film and digital media screenings.

Course requirements may include an in-class presentation, regular participation in a course blog, and final paper project. The course will fulfill requirements towards English, Sexuality Studies, and Asian American Studies majors and minors. (Check with your program/department for more details.)

This course explores 20th and 21st century U.S. ethnic literatures through the frames of U.S. empire, literary experimentation, and sexuality. In what ways did U.S. imperialism—chattel slavery, westward expansion, overseas war and colonization, economic and cultural neocolonialism—produce racialized subjects? In what ways are processes of racialization simultaneously processes of gendering and sexualization? How have African American, American Indian, Chicano/a, and Asian American writers engaged critically and creatively with such processes of racial and sexual subordination? What sorts of literary experiments have they invented and used to claim cultures and communities of survival, renewal, and transformation?

This course examines literary and filmic texts by and about US women of color over the past three decades and the transition to fourth-wave and post-feminism. This course will examine the way literary and filmic texts attempt to expose and heal deep political, economic and social rifts in US society, especially over issues of human rights, gender and racial justice. We will focus on the narrative elements such as point-of-view, style, structure, and voice. Our texts will help to develop frameworks of “third-world,” transnational, women of color and post-feminisms. This course will continually return to the filmic and literary works with questions of context and influence. How do activists, artists and writers, working within human rights, transnational and national contexts, attempt to resolve long-standing political, social and economic issues regarding gender, sexual, and racial justice?

Course requirements include short written assignments, individual or group presentation, final essay or digital narrative project.

Students will explore the arts in Japan from ancient to contemporary, covering a wide range of materials, including sculpture, calligraphy, ink paintings, architecture, photography, contemporary painting, and woodblock prints. We will discuss historical and social contexts, such as gender and representations of the body, Buddhist versus secular viewing contexts, and the relations of power involved in the collection of “Japanese art.” The class will follow a rough chronological order while allowing the linkages between past and present to be examined, rather than obscured. No past experience in Japanese studies or art history required.

This advanced seminar will focus on the critical themes of urbanization, gender, trauma theory, individualism and collectivism, center-periphery models, and the discursive relation between the global and the national. We will consider when the postwar begins and ends, what “Japanese art” means today, and how Japanese artists have absorbed, influenced, and critiqued American art. Our investigations will include diverse media such as painting, performance art, anti-art, manga, assemblage, calligraphy, and illustration. Japanese reading ability is not a requirement.